DreamWorks Animation releases MoonRay 2.15
DreamWorks Animation has updated MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, now available open-source.
Key changes in MoonRay 2.15 include a new automated testing suite for developers, support for machines with NUMA architectures, and new options for materials and the fisheye camera.
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer, used on all recent DreamWorks movies
Open-sourced in 2023, along with Arras, DreamWorks’ in-house cloud rendering framework, MoonRay is a high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer.
It was designed with the aim of keeping “all the cores of all the machines busy all the time”, and has an hybrid GPU/CPU mode with that matches the output of CPU rendering.
MoonRay is capable of both stylized and photorealistic output, and has the key features you would expect of a VFX renderer, including AOVs/LPEs and deep output.
It comes with a Hydra delegate, hdMoonRay, making it possible to integrate MoonRay as a viewport renderer in DCC apps that support Hydra delegates, like Houdini and Katana.
The renderer is still in active development at DreamWorks Animation, and was used on the studio’s recent movies, including Kung-Fu Panda 4 and The Wild Robot.
No, you haven’t missed MoonRay 2.0 to 2.16
If you’ve been following recent updates, MoonRay 2.15 seems like a huge jump, the previous release having been MoonRay 1.7.
That jump is actually due to a change in version numbering policy, rather than reflecting the number of new features.
DreamWorks now uses the same versioning for the public release as for its internal repositories, with a major numbering bump when a new production locks off on a particular version.
New developer features: automated test suite for regression testing
For developers, the major new feature is the Render Acceptance Test Suite (RATS), a set of automated tests intended to catch visual regressions caused by changes to the code base.
It works by comparing canonical images rendered with a previous version of the renderer with versions rendered with the current development build.
The suite consists of around 400 mini-scenes, each designed to test some aspect of the renderer, camera, materials, maps or lights.
MoonRay also now supports Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures, often used to improve performance on systems with high numbers of CPUs.
New artist features: new TwoSidedMap, and updates to materials and cameras
For end users, changes include the new TwoSidedMap for two-sided textures, and support for rotation of UDIM-format image textures in ImageMap.
Other changes include support for multiple BSSRDFs in a single material, new per-BSDF lobe LightSets, and a new FOV attribute for the fisheye camera.
Licensing, system requirements and release dates
MoonRay is available under an open-source Apache 2.0 licence.
The software can be compiled from source on Linux and macOS: it is tested on Rocky Linux 9 and macOS 14 and 15. You can find build information in the online documentation.
XPU mode requires a NVIDIA GPU that supports CUDA and OptiX on Linux, and an Apple Silicon processor on macOS.
Read a full list of new features in MoonRay 2.15 in the online release notes
(Includes download links for the source code)
Read more about MoonRay on the product website
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